IntroductionThis HOWTO describes how to install drivers for the Asus PCE-AC88 Dual-Band AC3100 Wireless PCIe-adapter on Debian Jessie. Since I bought this card myself and ran into some issues I decided to create this HOWTO, so others will hopefully have an easier time. But before we begin I must give credit to the people at the Fedora forums (http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1769999) and especially Hellacopter, without whom I would never have succeeded and this guide would not have existed.

WARNING: This HOWTO is very experimental and 'hackish'. I am merely describing how I installed drivers for the Asus PCE-AC88. I do not guarantee this works for you or that it is safe. It might damage your system. It is highly recommended that you make a back-up before starting!

Required skill levelI have tried to make this HOWTO as easy as possible, but it can be quite hard on beginners. This HOWTO involves installing a kernel and firmware from backports, using squashfs-tools, dd and a lot of command line use, which not everyone might be comfortable with it.

Repositories usedIn this HOWTO we will be making use of the backports repository and it also requires packages from non-free archive area. In addition we will download firmware from the ASUS website. Note that packages from Jessie-backports are not as safe. To quote from https://backports.debian.org/:

Backports cannot be tested as extensively as Debian stable, and backports are provided on an as-is basis, with risk of incompatibilities with other components in Debian stable. Use with care!

Step 1: Editing sources.listOpen the file /etc/apt/sources.list with your favourite text editor. Be sure to use root permissions (either by using the root account or making use of sudo)! Add the following two lines at the end of the file if they are not already included:

Step 2: Upgrading kernel via backportsThe Asus PCE-AC88 requires a kernel with version 4.4+, so first we need to check which kernel version we're using and upgrade if necessary. To check the current kernel version open a terminal and enter the following:

If your version is lower than 4.4+ you will need to upgrade your kernel. If not, you can skip this step and continue with step 3. To upgrade the kernel, we will install a kernel from Jessie-backports. To do so, run the following command as root:

Step 4: Extracting the firmware from the ASUS websiteAlthough we have installed the firmware package from Jessie backports, we still need to do the hardest step: extracting the firmware from the ASUS website. But first we need to install the necessary tools. To do so run the following command as root:

WARNING: Do not try to use a newer firmware version, otherwise the HOWTO will not work! (Although it might with some modifications, but you're on your own! But if you manage to get things working, let me know!)

There will now be a new file with the filename 'RT-AC88U_3.0.0.4_380_3341-g25420f5.trx'. We will use dd to extract a squashfs file from it:

If not, something went wrong. In this case delete the directory you made before downloading the firmware from Asus and repeat step 4. However, if the output is identical, we can copy the firmware file to the firmware directory. To do so execute the following as root: